Swinging London in iconic snapshots

26 March 2003 — 11:00am

Myself and Eye, on show at the new lakeside exhibition space of Canberra's National Portrait Gallery, surveys Lewis Morley's long and serendipitous life as a photographer.

Morley appears to have enjoyed at least three lives while successfully pursuing two discrete careers. Born in 1925 to an English father and a Chinese mother in Hong Kong, he grew up as a member of the most privileged Eurasian class in the then-British colony, until his adolescence was rudely interrupted with internment by the Japanese army in 1941.

"People say life in the camps was terrible," Morley told me recently at the National Portrait Gallery. "But I was lucky. I worked in the kitchens at Stanley Internment Camp and got extra food. I also had a girlfriend in the camp. And you could trade anything for a couple of cigarettes."

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When Morley was a teenager, his photography was only a hobby practised on a plastic Bakelite Brownie camera. What really interested him during his captivity were drawing and painting with watercolours. "I used to swap cigarettes for paints and paper," he said. "My drawings weren't very good but it was a start. I still have some of those pictures."

After the war his family were repatriated to London, where he enlisted in the Royal Air Force. The dandy in him justified his choice of becoming an airman by declaring, "I look better in grey."

When he left the air force, he studied commercial design, enrolling at Twickenham Art School between 1949 and 1952. Five years later, he was accomplished enough with his Exakta and Leica cameras for Norman Hall, the influential editor of Photography magazine, to publish six pages of his pictures, praising him as the latest young British discovery.

But it would be the next decade that established him.

He became friendly with the comedian Peter Cook, who offered him studio space above his satirical nightclub, The Establishment. The comedian would become both a regular subject for Morley and his friend and landlord.

Quite by chance, Morley found himself near the centre of social and artistic change in London.

His early style reveals him to be more than competent as an observer of people - witness his 1957 picture of a rainswept bride being led into a London pub, or an elegant 1958 observation of a lone newspaper reader in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.

But he would soon reveal a distinctive talent for studio portraiture. His 1963 nude of Christine Keeler, softly lit as she straddled an Arne Jacobsen chair, quickly became a symbol of the fragile politics of the '60s.

But looking past this image's notoriety (it has been published hundreds of times throughout the world, often without Morley's permission), it is still remarkable for the calculated, intimate response Morley coaxed from the political courtesan who had just ruined the career of a British minister, John Profumo. "It was the very last shot on the roll," Morley told Myself and Eye's curator, Magda Keaney. "I was walking away and turned back. She was in a perfect position and I just snapped it."

But Morley later admitted to me: "I never found her sexy, though. She reminded me too much of Vera Lynn!"

He produced fine portraits of other key '60s figures - an earnest, peach-faced Susannah York caught in close-up in 1965 and an apparently mundane portrait from the same year of Andre Previn.

He showed the slightly chubby young musician sitting at a hotel room table scattered with breakfast debris.

What lifts this image for me is the precision with which Morley captured Previn's introspection.

A commission in 1961 to take publicity portraits for the Beyond The Fringe satirical revue led to another memorable picture - of the comedian and musician Dudley Moore. "I was photographing the four boys [Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller] and I looked around and Dudley was lagging miles behind," recalled Morley. "I shouted, 'For Christ's sake, Dudley, come on!' and suddenly he hunched over and posed like the Hunchback of Hyde Park and I snapped it."

Magda Keaney explores these natural extremes in Morley's subject matter, such as in a shot of two naked young women quietly smoking marijuana at a 1965 London party.

Many of his London photographs are similarly artless observations with little sense of having been directed. However, Barry Humphries received special treatment in 1963. For his friend, Morley created a slightly surreal confection in which the facade of The Establishment nightclub was superimposed over the wanly gesturing, lank-haired satirist. The resulting image now seems excessively mannered, but undeniably of its time.

Morley is rightly acclaimed for his documentation of '60s Britain, but a second, longer career began when he and his family emigrated to Australia in 1971.

Keaney ignores the prodigious interior and food photography produced by Morley for BELLE and Woman's Day, concentrating instead on the portraits he made for these and other Australian women's magazines - including the influential POL, itself the subject of a parallel show at the National Portrait Gallery's Old Parliament House space.

For his Australian portraiture, Morley embraced and mastered colour photography, producing a number of valuable observations of significant Australians. His 1975 portrait of Junie Morosi (far sexier than Christine Keeler, Morley confided) conveyed her sensuality and intelligence in equal measure.

His best pictures flow from a certain playfulness with the camera, reinforced by his ability to establish rapport with disparate subjects. His work attempts to capture joyfully the nature of experience, a philosophy also espoused by the late French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, whom he now rates above his first inspiration - Henri Cartier-Bresson.

As we left the gallery, I asked Morley what he thought about his life's work, now that it was finally on display. He smiled, then replied that if he walked into the show and didn't know who took the pictures, he would have said "Not bad!"